Emotions mined at ground zero

NEW YORK — The excavation of endless geological grief called the World Trade Center dig has lasted nearly five months.

Digging is the kind of job you hope never to do in the first place. This isn't digging ditches or digging for pipe or digging to plant bulbs that will bloom in the spring.

The diggers lift some dirt and put it over there, and go through it with their gloved hands, looking for human remains. They move it a shovelful at a time, until they are spent or until they come across the dreaded prize.

The things they find down there, where the sky collapsed into the ground, are determined to some extent by gravity. And then there are the inexplicable things, the things so oddly out of place this far underground. A yo-yo. Signed personal checks. Notes.

"Personal notes," firefighter Jack Carlson said.

They started digging in the heat of late summer atop an eight-story heap of wreckage they nicknamed "The Pile."

Now the heap has disappeared, and their sweat has turned to ice, and they've penetrated the underground wreckage, and they've renamed the site "The Pit" or "The Hole."

The deeper they dig, the stranger it gets. At first, they found an empty PATH train. Now, way below sea level, they find wallets, blueprints, toys in the dead light of emergency sites. Cash registers. A piece of a plane, shiny and seemingly brand new.

A photo album.

"I was afraid to look inside," says Carlson, 36, a medical officer with the Fire Department.

They found a Citibank vault, full of money, neatly wrapped and stacked.

"It looked like Monopoly money," Port Authority Lt. Don Heffern said.

There are the things they find, and the things they don't find. What's whole, and what's not.

An unbroken pane of glass. Port Authority Police Officer Anthony Croce, 32, was digging through the rubble, as he has done six and seven days a week and every holiday since Sept. 11, when he came across the large gleaming sheet of glass, still intact. He picked it up and gazed at it, somewhat insensibly. He noticed only a hairline crack running through it. He tossed it aside, into a pile of debris.

"All of a sudden it hit me," he said, "how rare it was to find unbroken glass, buried in the dirt four levels down."

He clawed through the pile until he found the glass again.

Two thousand people work in shifts around the clock, seven days a week, on a job that has long since lost its aura of heroism. With the adrenaline gone, what's left is sheer ethic.

"It's taxing, and repetitive, and mundane, and grungy, but it's not boring," said Lt. Mark Winslow, the Port Authority's commander of the disaster site.

"There's a greater purpose, to bring everyone home. You could work for years and never have months like this, where you're doing something this important every day, that matters to somebody."

Dirt team keeps digging

Winslow and his fellow diggers have given themselves a nickname: "The Dirt Team."

The 16-acre ground zero site is under a unified command: The diggers are city law-enforcement officers and firefighters, engineers from the city's Department of Design and Construction, and an army of union laborers provided by four contractors hired by the city. They work in 12-hour shifts, on rotations determined by their departments. But the shifts often extend to 14 or 15 hours, because the relief is late, or because they have unearthed a remain and no one will leave until the victim has been "sent home."

The duty is optional; if a digger wants to be transferred, he is.

"Everyone in my job wants to be here. You know who I feel sorry for? The guys who are doing the same thing they were doing on Sept. 10," Winslow said.

Many routinely work overtime, and on their days off as well.

Firefighter Carlson collects overtime pay.

"I couldn't tell you what it is, and I don't care," he said.

Otherwise their reward is the thanks of the families, and an occasional gesture from passing New Yorkers.

"The joke is, now they wave at us with all five fingers," Winslow said.

The vault of the Bank of Nova Scotia was down there too. It took three days in November, and 150 Brinks trucks, to remove the gold and silver bars worth half a billion dollars.

One day the diggers were raking through the ruins of an underground parking garage ramp, and they realized the dirt was full of drugs. A vault from a customs office had fallen through several floors and into the underground garage, where it broke open and spilled its contents: bagged and tagged evidence from drug busts.

Some of the bags split open. They were shoveling heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine.

Procedures to follow

Bureaucracy has moved in, the agencies and offices: EPA, FEMA, OEM, OSHA.

The first time a bureaucrat told Port Authority Sgt. Kevin Devlin, 44, to wear his mask, he said: "I was in a 150-degree hole--don't tell me what I can do."

Now the diggers have to wear helmets and goggles and respirators, and they aren't allowed to eat near the pit, and they have to sanitize and disinfect their boots and clothes at a wash station when they exit the area.